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How to find great talent: 4 questions for Bloomberg View’s George Anders

Here’s a question that bedevils everyone from Fortune 500 boards seeking a replacement CEO to school principals hiring a new algebra teacher, from families looking for a great electrician to baseball teams searching for a better shortstop:

How do you find extraordinary, game-changing talent?

George Anders is a top-shelf business journalist, a veteran of the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and now Bloomberg View. For the last couple of years, he’s tried to answer that question by hanging out with the best talent spotters in the world – the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, a squadron of basketball scouts, the folks at Facebook, and many more.

You looked at talent both widely and deeply. What’s the big insight you had after completing this book that you didn’t have when you began it?

Everybody should be searching for resilience, and hardly anyone does. Being able to bounce back from adversity is crucial in just about every field I examined. You need resilience to be a great CEO, a great teacher, soldier, investor, etc., etc. But when we hire, we’re taught to regard setbacks — regardless of what came next — as flaws in a candidate. So when we prepare our own resumes, we hide our stumbles. That’s wrong! We should cherish people who have extricated themselves from trouble in the past.

I was especially intrigued by your idea of the “jagged resume” in part because I realized that I myself sorta had one of these way back when. Tell us what you mean by that term and why it matters.

Steve Jobs is a perfect example. Both in the 1970s and the 1990s, his life was a wild blend of great strengths and apparent failures. He had this awesome imagination, persuasiveness, ambition and design aesthetic. But he was a college dropout who later got forced out of one company (Apple) and couldn’t make a success of another (NeXT.) You could come up with lots of reasons why his resume was too erratic — too jagged — to make him a good bet. But to appreciate someone like that, you need to see why his strengths matter so much, and why his apparent flaws aren’t important.

You also write about “talent that whispers” — and why it’s sometimes undervalued. Give us an example and explain why we should notice this expression of ability.

Look at the amateur baseball draft, where some teams stop picking after 30 rounds because they assume all the good players have already been grabbed. Every year or two, a future All-Star sits unclaimed. Mike Piazza, the great catcher, was a 62nd round pick. Weird but true. Especially when you’re dealing with young, unproven people, some candidates show just a glimmer of promise. Their talent whispers. Don’t scoff at them. Look to open the door, just a crack, so that when long shots come of age, they’re more likely to be working for you than for the competition.

Let’s say a PinkBlog reader wants to be a “rare find” him or herself. What are some specific things he or she should be doing to stand out from the crowd?

Find the frontier. If you want to be extraordinary, restlessness is a virtue. It’s also a great traveling companion for resilience; if you can combine the two of them, your chances of finding society’s greatest opportunities in any particular decade are huge. Hang out with people just as driven and passionate as you. The great hotbeds of talent are self-sustaining because competitive internal friendships guide rapid progress. When in doubt, come back to autonomy, mastery and purpose. Those are keepers!

10 Responses to “How to find great talent: 4 questions for Bloomberg View’s George Anders”

Dan: Thanks so much for yet another referral that is guaranteed to enrich. I feel this book will be an extraordinary asset to the folks I’m beginning to work with (with whom I’m beginning to work): the recently defined “new poverty” group of those whose old jobs have gone and are never coming back, plus those in my “radio generation” – still vibrant, seasoned, experienced, mostly wise and wanting to continue to contribute into what used to be called “later life. As seniors, we continue to compete for the same jobs that are reportedly to be scarce for recent college graduates and being able to benefit from Anders observations will help with positioning, marketing and competing. Thanks, and always – love your work!

In 4 questions you got to the heart of the matter and the answers are worth GOLD. Resilience, grit, daring to venture, failing and bouncing back with the same enthusiasm as before, these are traits underappreciated in the job market.

Resilience and grit are things we’re hearing about a lot more these days from schools, to boardrooms to Navy Seal training.

We live in challenging and uncertain times that require hardy and smart individuals who can perform even when things get rough.

So… don’t underestimate the value of people learning from their mistakes. And recognize that sometimes you can find a diamond in the rough. Earth shattering stuff here. Somebody stop the presses!

Mr. Anders should write a book about how to take common business truisms, warm them up, repackage them and garnish them with some catchy buzzwords in order to sell books. That, at least, might be helpful to the reader.

I agree that resilience and restlessness are a great combination. I also believe it is hard to combat the “fear” that those who hire have for people like this. Again, been there done that, and I find it very difficult to convince those who have the power to take what is seen as a risk and step “out of the box.” How do you suggest those who are out of the box get in places where they can make their ideas reality?

I have a”jagged” resume for sure! It scares most of decision makers off. I am a “seasoned” candidate……which to me means background and wisdom. Not so as I continue my position search. Thank you for the comments. They are supportive and I happen to think true!

Thanks for this, Dan. Inspired by the above, my copy has just arrived. I am curious to understand the implications of this book for the growth in freelancing: how do hirers adjust their methods to find really talented freelancers; how to freelancers make themselves find-able?